His inescapable relentlessness, the injustice of it after what he’d done, made her want to howl. “I hate you,” she spat. “I wish you were the one who’d died.”
Pain like she’d punched him creased his beautiful face before he smoothed it out. “I wished that sometimes, too, baby,” he said, coming closer, putting himself in range of her fists. “But I wouldn’t have done it. Not when I still needed to tell you how sorry I am.”
The sound she let out was animal. “Don’t.” It was the plea of the thing that couldn’t claw itself free.
“What I did to you was the worst mistake of my life.”
She took a step toward him and raised her fists.
“Sofia,” he groaned, the animal too. His eyes were bright in the darkness as they searched hers. “Why won’t you let me apologize? Why won’t you let me try to make this better? Talk to me. Tell me how I can make this better.”
“Tell me,” he’d whisper to her in the dark. “Tell me what feels good. Tell me what you need.” Their lovemaking had been crowded with words; Aish’s mother had told him that women make love with their minds, and he’d put that advice to good use when he’d talked to her in his thrummingly low voice.
“Your round little clit...tell me if you like...you squeeze me so tight...does it feel good when I push...your cunt is so soft...tell me what you want...lick you for days...tell me if this feels...tell me...tell me...”
That boy melded with this man, bigger, broader, more intent and demanding, and what she wanted to do was tear him apart. She wanted to rip and demolish him into tiny pieces that she could scatter in the dark, sprinkle through the tunnels so that he could never tempt her again. Never make her want, never ever make her need.
She wanted to destroy him with her hands.
She leaned over and flicked off the lantern. Then she dropped to her knees and pressed her palms against the front of his jeans.
He jerked. His grunt of shock echoed through the darkness.
Blind, she cupped him with one hand, at his balls and base, and used the other to stroke up. And up and up. He was hardening beneath her touch. So thick and long. So hot and familiar.
She leaned in and pressed her face against that hardness between her hands, rubbed her lips against the warm denim and inhaled that basic essence of him, salt and sand. All the memories of a decade ago came crashing back.
He gave a sound like she’d stabbed him.
She reached for his button.
“Sofia, I—”
“Mira, guapo, if you talk, I will stop.” She felt the heat of her breath against his clothes. “Y no creo que quieras que me detenga.”
“And I don’t think you want me to stop,” she said in Spanish to ensure that he wouldn’t, regressing to that nineteen-year-old girl who believed in the power that her words, her voice, her mouth, and body had over him. Who’d believed without a flicker of doubt that he needed her.
As she pulled down his zipper, she gloried in the hitch of his breath like he couldn’t decide.
She knew exactly what she wanted. She stroked her lips over the skin of his abdomen, silky and tight and as familiar as her own skin, as she pulled down the elastic of his briefs in the V of his jeans.
His hot cock reared up against her knuckles, kicked into her fist, an eager old friend. Sightless and fascinated by the memories stored in her touch, she stroked down it, up it, focused her attention there at the rim, wondered if running her thumb over the velvety head still...
Ten years older and a million lovers later, he gave a full-body groan like she knew he would.
“Are you safe?” she asked him, her words haunting in the chamber. He’d always been adamant about this, a kid who’d seen a lot in LA, and she and Aish had been tested before they’d gone without condoms. About protection, he’d taught her a level of self-respect that she carried to this day. She wondered if this rock-and-sex god remembered the same level of self-respect.
Stroking and punishing his gorgeous cock for all of her abiding and unwanted affection for it, making him speechless and gasping above her, she leaned close and gave one tiny, delicate kiss to the steely shaft. “Hermoso, are you safe?”
His words were strained babble. “Yeah, I was tested a year ago and that was after the last time I—”
She put her mouth around his cock and swallowed him down.
“Fuck,” he yelled, and tunneled his fingers into her hair.
This was what she wanted. She wanted him filling her mouth and hitting the back of her throat. She bobbed over him, rememorizing the feel of him with her lips and tongue, relearning the sounds of his gasped breaths and caught groans. She pulled back when he was wet all over and licked at his tip, tasted the salty precome beading in his slit, worked her flat tongue all over his shaft and head. He was delicious in the dark, like he’d always been, but she could feel the razor-thin restraint in him. He panted her name above her, petting her scalp, combing through her hair.
She didn’t want his restraint. She wanted him desperate with need.
She took him deep again, worked him roughly until he was dripping, reduced to grunts, until those big hands clenched in her hair.
The pull on her scalp made her drop a hand between her legs.
She wanted mastery over him. She wanted him and could use him this way, could get herself off getting him off. Down here, in her ancient cellar, the dark behind her closed eyelids was the same dark when her eyes were open and it was like a dream she’d deny she had: Aish Salinger in her mouth
